Giant crystal tasting balloons are brought to your table with great pomp and ceremony, encased in a smoke-filled glass dome that is removed extravagantly. It’s almost comical, but don’t laugh. Drinking elite rum here is a serious business.

There, in the shadows of a building that dated back to the Soviet occupation, by the look of it, she smoked as I sipped beer. But chatting about our day of exploring the city, we weren’t expecting the slice of Budapest life that was about to unfold.

And we would have missed it completely if our accommodation plans had worked out as intended.

I’ve embarked on diving excursions in the Galapagos Islands, Cuba, and Mexico, but the Great Barrier Reef boasts the most colourful coral I’ve seen anywhere, and a host of reef life, including sea turtles, minke whales, dolphins and clownfish, not to mention a 7-foot whitetip shark who, “checked me out”…

Hunyadi Castle, in Eastern Transylvania, is the major sight in the town of Hunedoara, which is studded with abandoned factories that date back to the Ceausescu era of the 1970s and 80s. Hunyadi’s origins echo 15th century masonry, and Vlad Tepes, it is suspected, might have been imprisoned within its walls at one time.

By pledging $100 million towards a new SETI research project, famed physicist Stephen Hawking has reinvigorated the search for extraterrestrials. Backed by the Russian tech billionaire Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Listen will be the biggest scientific enterprise yet to seek signs of intelligent life outside our solar system. Do we dare disturb the universe? What if our celestial neighbours don’t want to play nice? Soon we may find out for sure.